Thornton Wilder

Thornton Niven Wilder (April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975) was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the two plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth — and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day. 2Early years Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor and U.S. diplomat, and Isabella Niven Wilder. All of the Wilder children spent part of their childhood in China. His older brother, Amos Niven Wilder, became Hollis Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School, was a noted poet, and was instrumental in developing the field of theopoetics. His sister, Isabel, was an accomplished writer. Both of his other sisters, Charlotte Wilder, a poet, and Janet Wilder Dakin, a zoologist, attended Mount Holyoke College. 2Education Wilder began writing plays while at The Thacher School in Ojai, California, where he did not fit in and was teased by classmates as overly intellectual. According to a classmate, "We left him alone, just left him alone. And he would retire at the library, his hideaway, learning to distance himself from humiliation and indifference." His family lived for a time in China, where his sister Janet was born in 191